The Brain Athlete will measure your thoughts and record your lapses in concentration

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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that no matter how many terrible iterations of the supposed “technology” get pumped out by electronics makers around the world, the ostensibly mind-reading gadget still remains a holy grail for users. After all, a gadget that can read minds is a gadget that doesn’t have any barrier to entry for the interface… in theory, at least.

The problem is that most of these so-called mind-reading gadgets do nothing more than try to translate facial-twitched and brow-furrowings into meaningful data… which, more often than not, it isn’t.

Consider us skeptical, then, of the claims of the Brain Athlete, which claims to be able to measure and record your brain activity while performing in professional sports. The idea’s sound enough: since concentration is important in many sports, the Brain Athlete tries to keep track of your many distractions and give you a real-time graph of the many points when your concentration peaks or lapses.

You wear it like any standard sports visor, and there are a couple of sensors built into the brim, as well as one that wraps around your ear. Data is transmitted by Bluetooth to a connected laptop.

Honestly, it looks a device that would be most suited to a sport like golf where you actually can perform in close proximity to an expensive laptop. I’m just skeptical thsat it can work: even if the Brain Athlete does what it says on the tin, how — exactly — does seeing a graph of your distractions help you improve your game, outside of the most obvious examples, like “Don’t let topless girls bring their trampolines onto the pitch?”